What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (34 page)

Three Islamic fanatics trying to kill us and we can’t dribble some water up their noses? Let’s be clear about the specific “torture” to which KSM and the other two were subjected: (a) threatening them with death; (b) threatening to kill their families; (c) firing off a gun in another room; (d) having one of our guys put a hood over his head and play dead so KSM would think he was next; (e) threatening KSM with a power drill; (f) playing loud heavy metal music; and my personal favorite, (g) blindfolding KSM and putting a caterpillar on him because he was afraid of insects. Poor Khalid freaked out because we put a bug on his toe.

Thanks to Obama’s decision to release all of the details about our EIT program and what we will now allow (the Fred Rogers approach to interrogation found in the Army Field Manual), the enemy knows what we will do to them if they’re captured and what we won’t. Now they know that they won’t get sleep deprived or waterboarded or a power drill by their ears or bugs on their feet. They know our hands are tied. Good luck getting any intelligence out of any captured terrorists. Oh that’s right: Obama isn’t capturing them, he’s killing them without so much as a shout-out to the Geneva Convention.

Despite the fact that Obama’s own Pentagon found “no such evidence” of abusive treatment of Guantánamo detainees in a February 2009 report, Obama and Holder decided to go to war with the Central Intelligence Agency.

In late August 2009, Obama made two incredibly dangerous and arrogant decisions. The first was the creation of the Global Engagement Directorate (GED), which put the questioning of terrorist suspects under the direct supervision of the White House rather than the CIA.

When President Richard Nixon consolidated national security decision-making in the White House, the leftists went bananas, accusing him of trying to end-run Congress. Similar charges were made against George W. Bush. And yet, it was the Obama regime that, in the fall of 2011, used the CIA’s military drones to actually kill three U.S. citizens, two of whom had al-Qaeda connections. Imagine if Nixon or Bush were picking off Americans with remote-controlled airplane missiles.

Obama’s shadowy GED invested him with unprecedented power over which there was no congressional oversight. It also undermined the CIA’s ability to hunt, spy on, and kill our enemies.

Which brings us to his second irresponsible decision: permitting Holder to investigate CIA officers who took part in several terrorist interrogations to see if they broke the law—something that in 2007 Obama pledged to do if elected president. This opened them up to possible criminal prosecution, which, in turn, cast a chill on all CIA officers and agents in the field. Why should they aggressively pursue terrorists if they might get hauled in for prosecution? Why would smart, talented young people who want to defend their country go to the CIA if first they need to lawyer up? Pretty soon, you’ll be able to go to a mall food court, walk up to a Sbarro Pizza, an Orange Julius stand, or an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and you’ll meet a bunch of ex-military personnel with master’s degrees in Arabic and Farsi, waiting for Obama to leave office so they can rejoin the intelligence community.

This was a blatant and highly unethical politicization of the Justice Department, and yet, where were all of those leftists who accused Bush and Cheney of engaging in this kind of extra-constitutional behavior?

One particular leftist took on the CIA by channeling her inner Norma Desmond. On April 23, 2009, the then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, held a bizarre press conference during which she debuted a disturbing crab walk, in which she moved in and out of the room sideways. She also said that she was only briefed once—in September 2002—on the advanced interrogation methods. At the time, Pelosi was the House Minority Whip and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. She said that CIA briefers told her that “the use of enhanced interrogation techniques were legal” and added that waterboarding “was not being employed.” However, CIA records show that during the September 2002 briefing, Pelosi and others were given “a description of the particular enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed” on Zubaydah, who was already being water-boarded. CIA officials said they believed agency briefers had indeed informed Pelosi that Zubaydah was undergoing waterboarding, and other members of Congress present at the 2002 briefing corroborated the CIA’s version of events.

Further corroboration came from CIA logs and by former representative Porter Goss (R-FL), who was then chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, later served as CIA director under President George W. Bush from 2004 until 2006, and was one of the four members of Congress briefed by the CIA in 2002.

Obama, Holder, and Pelosi lied about what they knew, when they knew it, and what the actual policy was. They blew off the fact that three former attorneys general and numerous other career Justice Department prosecutors looked at the findings of the May 2004 CIA inspector general’s report as well as other evidence and issued detailed memoranda as to why “the facts did not support criminal prosecution.” Holder admitted that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading the memoranda. Does anybody in Washington read anything important or is it all just
Penthouse
and
Garfield
?

This would be the same attorney general who, in a May 13, 2011, hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, could not even acknowledge the existence of radical Islam.

It’s not odd that Holder would show himself to be a full-blown kook unable to call the Islamic enemy by its own name. But what
was
odd is that Holder’s inane political correctness about radical Islam came just eleven days after his boss had okayed a mission to blow away the world’s most notorious radical Islamic terrorist.

One o’clock in the morning, Abbottabad, Pakistan. Two stealth Black Hawk helicopters land on a nondescript compound and deposit several men who enter the premises. Within a few minutes, the terrorist is dead, shot once through the chest and once through the head. As a pool of blood formed quickly around his body, a radio crackled to life: “Geronimo. Enemy killed in action.” “Geronimo” was the code name for Osama bin Laden, the ultimate and elusive symbol of evil incarnate.

For years, the Left pounded President Bush for his innovative counterterrorism policies, and yet
all
were used to locate OBL and ultimately kill him. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan and brought to a black site somewhere in Eastern Europe. There he was waterboarded and had the caterpillar placed on his toe. At some point, the EITs broke him, and he went from silence to being a Chatty Cathy. Jose Rodriguez, the head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center from 2002 to 2005, said Abu Faraj al-Libbi, al-Qaeda’s number three leader, started talking just one week after being subjected to the EITs. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded but KSM was, and the CIA was able to corroborate their information to come up with the nickname of bin Laden’s most trusted courier, which “eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound,” said Rodriguez. Ultimately, we were able to listen in on a call the courier made to someone on whom we were eavesdropping under the Bush policy of warrantless wiretaps. It’s ironic that Obama was celebrated for using
the exact tools and policies for which he mercilessly criticized Bush
. If Obama had any shred of class or graciousness, he would’ve openly thanked Bush and his team for setting up the strategic, tactical, and legal framework that made OBL’s death possible. What exactly did Obama do here? Make a phone call?

Immediately after OBL’s killing, the White House and its foot soldiers in the Congress and media began referring to Obama’s decision as “gutsy.” Thanks to consummate planning and professionalism by our
truly
gutsy Navy SEALs, the bin Laden mission was executed nearly perfectly, but the White House argued that it just as easily could’ve gone south. The adjective “gutsy” was used ad nauseam, as a way of equating Obama’s supposed “courage” with that of the men who had actually entered the compound. Once again, it was all about Obama: his wingmen used the word “gutsy” as propaganda to tout his
political
“bravery.”

Was, however, the decision by the president to okay the mission
really
“gutsy,” given that our intelligence services had been piecing together key clues about bin Laden’s whereabouts for nearly a year prior? If it were to ever emerge publicly that Obama knew or had a relatively good idea where bin Laden was and
didn’t
act, Obama’s presidency would have been over. Too many people in intelligence, the military, and the White House knew what Obama knew. If he didn’t order the mission and bin Laden escaped, somebody would’ve leaked it and his legacy would’ve been destroyed. If he ordered the mission and it went badly, he could at least argue that he had tried. According to Chuck Pfarrar, a former Navy SEAL Team Six commander who wrote of the mission in his book,
SEAL Target Geronimo
, Obama was playing golf twenty minutes before the raid began so that “if this had completely gone south, he was in a position to disavow.” Gutsy? Meh.

What was
truly
gutsy was
Bush’s
decision to keep pressing the counterterrorism policies despite the relentless pounding he got from his critics. It would have been much easier and much more politically profitable for Bush to pack it in, shut Guantánamo, stop EITs earlier than he did, halt the warrantless wiretapping, and so on. But he knew this was not about how he looked to the
New York Times
editorial board. It was about the safety and security of the nation and prosecuting a war against an unprecedented kind of enemy. He kept the policies and took the fire for it. After 9/11, President Bush announced that we would seek out terrorist enemies of the United States wherever they are in the world and deliver justice. We now know what constitutes the Obama Doctrine. It’s called the Bush Doctrine.

In the euphoria over bin Laden’s elimination, however, Team Obama released far too much information about the mission and its aftermath. No one should have known the name of the courier tracked to bin Laden’s compound, that retired Pakistani military officers were recruited by the CIA to watch the compound from a nearby post, which particular helicopters were used, the Afghan base from which our SEALs departed, how they evaded Pakistani radar, the number of SEALs involved in the raid, and which al-Qaeda plots we learned about from which laptops and thumb drives we seized.

Why all of the blabbing? Politics and reelection. Amazingly, Team Obama and Pentagon officials leaked highly classified details about the raid to Kathryn Bigelow, the director of
The Hurt Locker
, as she developed a film about the mission. The movie just happened to be set for release in October 2012 … mere weeks before the presidential election. Sony Pictures moved the release date to after the election after complaints about its possible propaganda purposes.

In its rapture to show the success of the mission, however, the administration may have compromised the next one. The first thing done by the Pakistani government—a supposed ally stung by accusations that it knew of and protected bin Laden’s whereabouts—was to broadcast the name of our CIA station chief in Islamabad. This endangered his life and his and others’ sensitive work in Pakistan. Thanks to Team Obama’s loose lips, jihadists of all stripes now have information that can help them avoid getting smoked like bin Laden.

Most important is something Obama has done under the radar. He has
intentionally
limited the enemy to al-Qaeda and what he calls “violent extremists.” By restricting the enemy simply to al-Qaeda, Obama could take out key al-Qaeda leaders such as bin Laden and al-Awlaki and lend the impression that the war on terror was drawing to a close. If bin Laden is gone and our drones are eliminating other key terrorists, then he can peddle the idea that the threat is greatly reduced and the domestic agenda can move back to center stage. But the war is not just against al-Qaeda. There are many violent and stealth Islamist groups willing to undermine or kill us. Just because 9/11 seems like a high-water mark for the jihad does
not
mean that somewhere, an anonymous new foe isn’t planning something even more lethal.

Obama’s self-serving limitation of the enemy to al-Qaeda makes it appear that we have no Islamic enemies beyond those particular terrorists. It also allows Obama to redefine the parameters of the war, declare victory, and retrench abroad. That’s convenient for him and his break-the-bank domestic agenda, but it’s untrue and dangerous. Obama saw the death of bin Laden as a good justification to withdraw from Afghanistan and in the general war on terror while turning back to his beloved domestic project.

Iraq and Afghanistan? He’s just not that into them.

When Obama entered office, he made it clear that he would kick off the New American Humility by hightailing it out of Iraq and holding his nose through a surge in Afghanistan before hightailing out of there too. There would be no more John Waynes and no more Clint Eastwoods. From now on, the symbol of America would be a grown man in a soiled diaper, too afraid to confront the world, equipped with a copy of the
New York Times
in one hand and an Occupy Wall Street drum in the other.

On August 31, 2010, Obama addressed the nation about U.S. involvement in Iraq. He spoke of that week’s final drawdown of combat forces as well as the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement, which called for the removal of all U.S. troops by December 31, 2011. He punctuated the end of a war he had vociferously opposed from its start, a war that had included a Bush-ordered surge of more than 20,000 additional combat troops, which Obama had blasted as unnecessary, wasteful, and irresponsible. Obama continually used the war generally and the surge in particular as political daggers aimed straight at Bush and the Republican Party as well as his 2008 Democratic primary challenger, Hillary Clinton, who, while serving in the Senate, had voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.